American history.
The Establishment and its propagandists regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights (legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives.…
“Multivariate analysis indicates,” according to an important recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination […], but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy.”…
Indeed, if the United States is not a democracy today, it is in large part due to the fact that it never was one. Far from being a pessimistic conclusion, however, it is precisely by cracking open the hard shell of ideological encasement that we can tap into the radical forces that have been suppressed by it. These forces—not those that have been deployed to destroy them—should be the ultimate source of our pride in the power of the people.In his rousing Gettysburg Address at the time of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln defined "democracy" as "government of the people, by the people and for the people." The definition is correct, but Lincoln misapplied it to the United States at the time, and that remains true today. In fact, the class hierarchy is more entrenched now than ever as shown by rising inequality of income and wealth, and the asymmetry of power.
Counterpunch
The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was
Gabriel Rockhill, Franco-American philosopher and cultural critic (public intellectual), Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, and founding Director of the Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne
13 comments:
This is a crucial insight that many of us on the left seem to so easily miss. Democracy isn't just lacking in the United States, of course, it's absent throughout the entire world and has been so for over 5,000 years.
Rockhill is right that the system isn't democracy but I firmly believe it goes much further. Not only is it not democracy, it's also not capitalism. Capitalism is far too vague and misleading a word. What can it possibly mean? Does capital mean 'money' - a mere token that's existed throughout all of civilization? Let's just call the system 'tokenism' then. Or perhaps capital should mean 'investment' but that takes us completely away from the central facts of minority ownership, power, and speculation. Others say capitalism is a private market system. But this also is misleading. It's not 'private' it's oligarchic. It's also hardly a 'market' (as in an idealized farmers market) when purchasing power and ownership is so concentrated.
The real problem is that the left wastes far too much time trying to explain to a confused public that 'capitalism' is somehow a paradoxical form of exploitation and bring in absurdly complex theories like use and exchange value, supply and demand factors, and so on. We need to drop the myths -- it's not democracy and it's not 'capitalism'. At root it's absurdly simple -- call it oligarchy or just plain old inequality and analyze the system on that basis.
I humbly wrote a book on this -- Capitalism as Oligarchy. Sorry for the plug but I feel this issue is extraordinarily important.)
Jim
Why doesn't this author not discuss Abraham Lincoln contribution to American History? Which countries are more democratic than us -- and why so?
Looking at the outside in from the UK.
What the US looks like today to me is the South lost the battle ( civil war) but have won the war ( run everything now and control America) It's only taken them 150 odd years to do it.
@ Jim
According to Michael Hudson, following the analysis of Marx, "capitalism" is what feudalism morphed into when industrial technology superseded land as the chief fact in the transition from the Agricultural to the Industrial Age.
Conventional economics has rolled land into capital. The owners of capital are the neo-feudal lords.
No there is an attempt to fold labor in to capital as human capital and in a sense this is appropriate for this analysis, since the workers that have the greatest share of human capital are part of the oligarchy even though they "work" in the sense of making a productive contribution instead of being rentiers that extract rent and don't produce anything.
This is reflected in the class structure that is reflective of the distribution of social status,power and wealth.
It is another form of oligarch that appeared historical with a shift in the means of production.
As Steve Keen has pointed out the chief factor is neither land, labor or capital but rather energy, since energy from food powers workers and various energy sources power machines. These sources of energy come from land either through agriculture or extraction.
So in addition to ownership of technology, ownership of land is also key in that land controls energy production.
fold labor in to capital
Economic servitude (debt) of the masses is the equivalent of slavery.
Hey Tom,
These are all good points but I think they're needless complications. I believe the goal of the left should be to explain the essence of the system -- its basic pattern -- in as simple and truthful way as possible. Adding needless complexity only hurts the cause of systemic change.
Your examples all focus on 'capital' and try to explain today in terms of it. Why not drop the whole concept of 'capital' as an unhelpful term and focus instead on the central fact of minority power? Why do we have to insist on talking about 'capital' and 'capitalism'? Whether ownership is of land or industry or technology is a mere detail that's immaterial to the central problem. Why focus on it? Same with 'human capital'. A needless distraction. If we focus on minority power -- inequality as a systemic structure -- then everything becomes extraordinarily simple and easy to communicate. Same problem with Steve Keen's energy idea. Maybe ok in academia but I see no reason to go there if the goal is basic understanding. The system is inequality, nothing more, nothing less and the underlying logic is ancient and simple.
The average person doesn't understand what's going on and the fundamental reason IMO is that the left insists on making what's absurdly simple complicated. The system isn't a 'capitalism' of which inequality is a side-effect, it's inequality itself of which capitalism is an ideology.
@ Jim
You are talking about political strategy, and regarding that, I agree that injecting economic analysis into it is unlikely to win the day.
Rather than diagnosing what is wrong and addressing this piecemeal, the political strategy should be based on an inspiring new vision and how to actualize it through policy. Diagnosing what is wrong and addressing this piecemeal just perpetuates the current context and its the context that is the problem.
Of course, to be credible the vision and plan presented to the public needs to included economic policy and how it achieves objectives. The explanations need to be simple and to the point.
Most people don't have to be told that a "free market" is not necessarily a fair market, for example. They are interested in getting to a fair market and they don't care so much to know the details.
They just have to be convinced that the people they are voting for know what they are doing. In other words, the issue is credibility and a major aspect of a political strategy is winning credibility.
The problem as I see on the progressive left is formulating and presenting a vision and a plan for actualizing it, and convincing voters that it is credible.
The closest thing to that now is Bernie, and Bernie hasn't really done the job.
Moreover, the left is too fractured to agree on something and unite behind a flag and standard bearer.
So the situation now is that the populist right is blowing itself up, and the progressive left is wandering in the weeds.
That leaves the field open for the bipartisan establishment and more of the same.
I think we can and should interject economic analysis but from the standpoint not of an ill-defined 'capitalism' but from a consideration of the dynamics of systemic inequality.
Good points about the left, right, and establishment.
When presenting in inspiring new vision that is as expansive a progressive vision needs to be, people are naturally going to wonder how it is going to be paid for, and whether their taxes are going up.
This where Bernie flubbed it with his soak the rich hokum. People know that is a non-starter politically after the votes are cast.
MMT has a simple and obvious answer in terms of the currency sovereignty and the distinction between the currency issuer and currency users. Anyone can understand this.
Then the next question will be, what about inflation. That is also simple to field using functional finance.
Then there is the concern about the deficit and debt. MMT has easy to understand answers to these issues, too.
Start with a vision and a plan for actualizing it and then anticipate the objections and issues likely to arise and be ready to meet them. It's really pretty simple in that these are not new ideas and have historical precedent.
In fact the arguments and evidence are so strong that the opposition will quickly be reduced to lying, along with personal attacks involving character assassination.
I was thinking the other day how capitalism was the perfect system for creating billions of slaves. Enforced slavery is not needed by the ruling elite when you have the 'free market' to do it for you. Now it's dead certain you would have runaway inflation without competition so you need the market, but this can be exploited as propaganda by the ruling elite to create the low waged economy that suits them so well.
The ruling elite tell us about the merits of hard work but Trump went bankrupt twice and was bailed out by a rich Saudi prince. He should be dead poor and not a president. It's the rich who live in the cradle to grave nanny state.
That's interesting, Tom. The One Percent own all the energy production. All the fuel production and all the food supply. With the banking system that they own as well which creates most of our money supply what room is there left for democracy?
That leaves the field open for the bipartisan establishment and more of the same.
Mission Accomplished.
It's not particularly mysterious. Capitalism as identified by Marx is the relationships characterizing the process of production. It's core is employer/employee, with the former determining how production will occur and what to do with the surplus and the latter obeying.
This is why we have income and wealth income inequality. A tiny group of people at the top of the business world control the national income and disproportionately reward it to themselves.
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